'Have You Seen...?'

by David Thomson

  The Ten Commandments won an Oscar for its special effects—the parting of the Red Sea, the printing of the tablets—but those set pieces are naïve now. Further, the saga of the Egyptians and the Israelites has become a feeble excuse for a film glorifying the wanton breaking of so many religious laws. Was there ever a population that fell for the stupendous confidence trick of such biblical films? Yes, there was. In 1956 “everyone” went to see it. It was the hit of the year with domestic rentals of over $34 million.

  Moreover, this country now seems more religious than it did then. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ went from being a film no one could see to a triumph. Yes, for our time and concern with moral issues, we have Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Dekalog. But DeMille’s picture still plays on television, still rents, and still seems to some people to have been made by God.

  It wasn’t. It had a script by Aeneas MacKenzie, Jesse Lasky, Jr., Jack Gariss, and Fredric Frank, based on three novels about Moses, two of them by clergymen. It was photographed by Loyal Griggs and J. Peverell Marley. DeMille himself read the narration. And the cast included not just Heston but Yul Brynner as Rameses, Anne Baxter, Edward G. Robinson, Yvonne De Carlo, Debra Paget, John Derek, Cedric Hardwicke, Nina Foch, Martha Scott, Judith Anderson, and Vincent Price. Follow the twenty-nine-page printout of cast and crew and you will find that Fraser Clarke Heston (Charlton’s boy) was the infant Moses, Woody Strode was the King of Ethiopia, Henry Brandon (Scar from The Searchers) was the Commander of the Hosts, Herb Alpert was a drummer on Mount Sinai, Richard Farnsworth was a chariot driver, Jon Peters was a boy on a donkey crossing the Red Sea, and Robert Vaughn was a spear carrier. The music was by Elmer Bernstein. The art direction was by Albert Nozaki, Hal Pereira, and Walter Tyler. Edith Head was one of five people doing costumes; over sixty people did makeup and hair. Farciot Edouart did the process photography. We could go on.

  The Terminator (1984)

  The last part of The Terminator—as the story becomes clear—is one of the great narrative passages in modern effects cinema, and I don’t want to spoil it for you if you haven’t seen the film. So, whatever your instincts, even if a vote for Schwarzenegger might be your least likely action, try the film. It comes from the best period of a giddy talent, James Cameron, and it is far superior to Titanic.

  A cyborg (Arnold) has been sent to the future, from 2029 as it turns out, to eliminate a young woman named Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) who lives in L.A. now. Why? Wait and see. She is a very tough young hoodlum—indeed, in this film and Terminator 2 (1991) Linda Hamilton introduced one of the most gutsy heroines American film has ever seen. She was not beautiful, but she was tough, brave, and no one to mess with. James Cameron (who had been married to his writer on this film, Gale Anne Hurd, and the movie director Kathryn Bigelow), later had a child by Hamilton—which is a kind of poetic justice.

  In fact, Sarah is helped by another visitor from the future, though an ordinary man, not an indestructible cyborg. This is Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), and he becomes very attached to Sarah. So what? What could the future care about all this? Work it out, or look at the movie.

  There was a good deal of joking at the time that Arnold Schwarzenegger was the only actor in sight who could play a cyborg without much makeup. In fact, his face looks puffy and his red-light eyes can be very nasty, but he’s a fascinating toy man in part because he manifests so much of Arnold’s natural charm. Just as he is a fearsome and very dangerous something for Sarah, it’s clear that the boy in James Cameron (a substantial part of the mixture) is delighted with his plaything, and in seeing just how damaged he can be but still keep ticking and hating. So it’s a fair fight, and just as in Aliens (the next year), what Cameron brings to the screen is nonstop combat where we feel for both parties.

  The script is by Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, with some dialogue by William Wisher. But it was revealed later that Cameron had taken some inspiration from a couple of Harlan Ellison scripts, “Soldier” and “Demon with a Glass Head.” The photography is by Adam Greenberg, and this is basically still a photographed film. Brad Fiedel did the music. Mark Goldblatt edited it, and George Costello did the art direction. The cast includes Paul Winfield, Rick Rossovich, Lance Henriksen, and Bill Paxton, though the minor characters are chaff in the wind of the intense central struggle. It’s startling today to find that the picture cost only $6.4 million—yet it grossed $383 million. (It’s old money meets new.) That profit margin was a huge stimulant to modern sci-fi, but it would be crazy to confine The Terminator to that genre. It tells a great story. It features a woman who might guard the world. And it helped us see that artificial personality ruled—or might govern.

  Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

  While forsaking much of the original film’s haunting narrative quality, above all in the feeling of a kinship between now and the distant future, T2 does smooth the way for a box-office sensation with the sequel. But it’s hard to complain, for this is one of the most exhilarating, unhindered battle films of all time. When people deride pure action films, and the heavy reliance on special effects and the digitalization of the image—and all three are viruses ready to destroy the world made by Bresson and Ozu—you can legitimately invoke T2 as one of those films that manage to be “his story” written in lightning, if not quite history. (I refer to what President Woodrow Wilson is supposed to have said about Birth of a Nation.)

  The essential situation of the first film is reprised: Linda Hamilton is living in scruffy Los Angeles with a young son (the one message left from the first film). As we realize now, this son (Edward Furlong, and a guttersnipe) is a serious threat to some kind of cyborg empire yet to come. And now a new menace comes back from the future to eradicate him. This is a new character who appears as a pristine policeman (Robert Patrick). But pristine verging on some new construction. He is not the old-model cyborg from 1984’s film. Rather, he is a force that can be “stopped” by bullets and so on for only a moment. Then, his liquid metal constituency (think of it as glowing mercury) simply reforms. Blown apart, sundered, and really roughed up: If a few drops of the metal remain, then he can rebuild himself—as he moves forward—and the film has staggeringly beautiful scenes where the mercury takes shape and the shape becomes the cop without him so much as breaking stride. Robert Patrick’s icy presence in this film, coupled with the malignant reanimation of Hugo Weaving in The Matrix, are landmark moments in the dramatic characterization of cyborg or cloned forms.

  But now the forces of good have done their best in sending back another cyborg to protect the kid. At which point, as I outline this sequel, you might begin to wonder, “Where’s Arnold?” Well, don’t worry—with Schwarzenegger’s reelection as governor of California in 2006 (an event once regarded as highly unlikely), it begins to be clear that he has a way of looking after himself. So, imagine Arnold watching the first film and saying to himself, “Gee—if I was likeable?” So here he is back again as a vigilante cyborg, often astride a motorcycle, in a deadly tourney with Robert Patrick. Now he’s a cyborg a kid could hug. He takes a beating in T2, and stuntmen are detectable at key moments. But the modest re-jig is enough to give the sequel its ignition and a great thrust of adrenaline.

  T2 is longer than T (and longer versions still come as DVD director’s cuts—James Cameron can hardly kill anything he loves). And that’s the great truth behind Patrick’s cyborg: Like the cat in Tom and Jerry he suffers death by a thousand deaths, and almost immediately goes back to that nice, oozy, shiny silver shit—the stuff of life. For us, his pleasure comes in being destroyed, so his life must always be renewable—he is a start-again death trip.

  This film cost $102 million (sixteen times the original), and it grossed $519 million (less than 1.5 times the original).

  La Terra Trema (1947)

  In the late 1950s, Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema was still regarded as a monumental and valiant realist experiment. More or less, with funding from the Italian Communist Party and his own wealth, the “re
d duke” had gone to an extreme of Sicily (the Aci-Trezza area) to make a vast three-part account of the harsh life there. He would study the sulfur miners, the peasants, and the fishermen. At the outset, Visconti had had thoughts of using the works of the Sicilian novelist Giovanni Verga as the bare fictional basis, with the real poor serving as players in the drama.

  In fact, he found the conditions of Sicily so overwhelming, and the difficulties so great, that La Terra Trema only deals with the fishermen. Still, it is 160 minutes long, and a clear sign of the first symphonic plans. There’s no doubt but that Visconti’s dedication was heroic, but even his great admirer, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, concedes that he was also in the dark:

  Visconti brought to the project a great amount of revolutionary fervour, and an even greater ignorance of actual conditions. The whole project can be fruitfully compared to Eisenstein’s equally grandiose and even less successful Que viva Mexico! Like Que viva Mexico!, La Terra Trema suffered from being abstractly conceived and unrealisable from the outset.… The contradiction was too great between what he wanted and what was there for him to see. Like Eisenstein, Visconti arrived on the scene as an outsider with the idea of making a film that would be at the same time a document and a call to arms.

  In that, we can see the first great clash between Visconti the realist and radical and the man who would become such a devotee of studio design and art direction. He dreamed of a kind of living opera in Sicily. But he still struggled to have the amateur actors speak lines, no matter that their dialect was confined to their own village. And so it is a film of epic imagery, stark black-and-white footage of the sea, the sky, rocks, and ships, done by G. R. Aldo with Gianni di Venanzo as his operator (these are great stylist cameramen in the making). This imagery lingers for inscrutable flat talk, when really the film could and should have been silent save for some great score. There is music (by Willy Ferrero), but it is nowhere near satisfying or arousing enough.

  The idea of this crew—it included the young assistant directors Francesco Rosi and Franco Zeffirelli—on location for six months in Sicily, with Communist funds and a taste for Rome’s delicacies, striving to get the fishing people to look like a chorus is both moving and comic, and it’s a valuable lesson in how documentary filmmakers (at least) need to look a long time before they decide what it is they can see. So La Terra Trema has receded today—and the nine-hour super-work would probably have been the final blow to any hopes of reform in tourism. But in the making of that odd man Visconti, this was a crucial folly.

  The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932)

  Here is a turning-point film, if you like, but one that needs very careful attention. First, let’s say that it announces the triumph of sound pictures—not just because of the eerie music (by Hans Erdmann) or the sound effects (the car horns at the fatal traffic light; the bomb ticking in the flooded room); nor even the very punchy police-style dialogue; but in the headlong rush of the film and the way in which a narrative on such electric rails forces us to hurry and attend. Sound film made audiences hang on for dear life—and you cling to this Mabuse for fear of being left behind, and because already the natural interplay of all sound and vision has become poetic—let’s just call it “cinematic.” So the very names “Lohmann” and “Mabuse” are words, or cries, that resonate musically throughout the film.

  Then there is this lever in time—call it 1932—with Fritz Lang urged by theater owners to bring Mabuse back. So he and Thea von Harbou (still married) did the script. The photography was in the hands of Fritz Arno Wagner and Karl Vash. And the superb décor is by Karl Vollbrecht and Emil Hasler—this is a film that needs everything from overstuffed salons to elemental stripped chambers. But always, the idea of the cell prevails and haunts the movie. Time and again in Lang, everything blooms from the frame and its interior frames.

  So Mabuse is back and now he seems to be the demented, ever-scribbling ghost in an asylum (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), allegedly looked after by Dr. Baum (Oscar Beregi). But the ghost has wormed his way into the mind and the white coat of the “doctor,” and so the figure of learned healing masks the demon—again. Indeed, Mabuse is so strong in Baum that he can even die and still direct his empire of crime. But the chilling new insight is not just that this empire seeks booty, so much as the spread of terror and unease. It seeks to dispel confidence.

  On the side of good there is the reformed prisoner, Tom Kent (Gustav Diessl); his girl, Lilli (Wera Liessem); and Lohmann, the chief of police (Otto Wernicke). Lohmann smokes all the time. He is Germanic, gloating and not the most gentle of souls. Lang’s police chiefs wear ambiguity the way they wear leather. Still it is a fair fight and a quite terrific suspense picture, enough to feed Hitchcock for years and keep 007 busy in decades to come. This is a seminal film in noir, paranoia, and the criminal web motifs.

  What happened then? Dr. Goebbels loved it: here, for a moment is a Goebbels we might talk to. He added that Adolf had always liked Lang’s films, too—so wouldn’t Lang like to head the new film office for the Nazis? The legend is that Lang split fast. Patrick McGilligan’s well-researched biography shows that the truth was more complicated. But Lang did leave eventually and settle on the side of the right. Still, don’t kid yourself—the exhilaration of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, and the sheer excitement of a real sound thriller (streets ahead of Scarface, say), with casual surface violence and a far more disturbing inner kind, raises the troubling question: Isn’t the film itself half in love with this wondrous, terrible Mabuse?

  That Hamilton Woman (1941)

  The story goes that after Rembrandt and I, Claudius, Alexander Korda rather lost interest in directing. Rembrandt had proved a flop, and I, Claudius (in the hands of Josef von Sternberg) went from one disaster to another. But the orthodox thinking is wrong and you can see Alex flourish again with the glorious and intoxicating That Hamilton Woman, made in Hollywood but pledged to the sanctity of English honor and courage.

  Once war broke out, his good friend Churchill was just one of those people urging Alex to make a picture for “morale.” As was his custom, he plunged into history and had considered Wellington and Waterloo before he hit on Nelson. The great coup in the production was that Larry Olivier and Vivien Leigh were not just available at the same time in America, but in need of cash after a forlorn theatrical tour of Romeo and Juliet. Some said the blush had gone off the rose of their affair. Never mind, Alex was every bit as ardent about Vivien as Larry had been, and if the girl needed a little loving he would provide it.

  So Alex and his brother Vincent (his designer) set up home at the General Services Studio. A script was furnished by Walter Reisch and R. C. Sherriff that would take as many liberties as it liked over the love affair between Nelson and Emma Hamilton—chiefly it made her a raving beauty still, no matter that the girl had put on weight in reality. Vincent Korda designed a great library for the Hamilton house in Naples and then quickly changed it to a bedroom—that is the set that has a quite beautiful shot of Emma running to the picture windows to see her beloved off the shore.

  As for the battle scenes, rowing boats were reequipped as miniature men-of-war with one paddler in each hull—and it all looks stunning, thanks to Vincent’s skill and the photography by Rudolph Maté. A serious issue of research arose over which eye and arm Nelson had lost by the end of his career. An elderly actor was discovered who had played Nelson long ago on stage. Which arm, which eye? he was asked. Well, he said, we never knew, so we changed it from night to night.

  Miklós Rózsa wrote the flamboyant music. Alan Mowbray played Sir William Hamilton. Gladys Cooper was Lady Nelson and Henry Wilcoxon was Captain Hardy. The entire thing was shot in six weeks, and paid for almost entirely out of the pockets of Korda himself and Merle Oberon. It proved an enormous success, and very important in the war effort. It was even an inducement to Leigh and Olivier to marry in reality, though there were onlookers who wondered if she loved him as much as he loved him. But it was the best film they ever did together, in which her in
tense beauty makes a perfect romantic partnership with his ravaged, white-haired gaze. Korda would direct again, but never with the same panache.

  That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)

  Mathieu is a man of the world—very little shocks him or shakes his debonair stride. Neither nuclear fallout nor feminism has withered his mustache. He is French, secure, wealthy, alone, and sometimes on a train from Seville to Paris he is compelled to throw a bucket of cold water over a young woman. Indeed, if life is going to be providential with young women, then let us hope there are ample buckets of fresh water to hand.

  What led to this? The most natural thing in the world. Mathieu took on a Spanish maid, Conchita (Angela Molina)—dark, voluptuous, needy, but eager—things a man like Mathieu (a natural connoisseur) could hardly fail to notice. He pursues his own maid, but does not notice that she is only Angela Molina sometimes. At other times she is Carole Bouquet—dark, sexual, needy, but aloof—things a man like Mathieu (a sensitive soul) is bound to appreciate. But how can he pin down “Conchita” when the phantom keeps separating, and he doesn’t even know which is which?

  This is the last film of Luis Buñuel, and it is worth waiting for. In their different ways, Conchita 1 and 2 can drive Mathieu crazy—not that a man of the world is likely to run amok or lose control in a vulgar, showy way. Still, when he had thought at last he was about to have Conchita, it is vexing to find himself on one side of a barred gate having to watch two or three other men take her instead. And it’s not that she seems amazed, outraged, or ill-matched by two or three. Indeed, the sounds he has to hear are rather satisfied, if not self-satisfied.